The Center for Public Integrity

MELBOURNE — They told Anna Vladimirovna that if she tried to escape, “things” could happen to her son and family back in the Ukraine.

COLOMBIA — The evening falls and the creek which will be a mandatory step in the trek towards the next “guerrilla haven” on the list of the feared Carlos Castaño, grows. This makes him impatient. The troops clean their M-16 and the AK-47 guns, get their cartridge holders, grenade-launchers, knives and mortars ready. With skillfulness they, most of them dark-skinned men between 25 and 20 years old, pack their provisions in their bags, strap their CB radios, and put on the black armband with white letters which read ACU: (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia) United Self-Defenses of Colombia. Silent, they stand on line formation on the plain terrain in front of the hut where we are talking to Castaño. In the meantime, inside, the self-defenses leader uses an increasingly political language. “Corruption weakens the Government and strengthens outlawed forces like us and like the guerrillas who even refuse to talk to President Samper,” he says again, while a hill of cigarette butts grows and the coffee that “the boy” — as he is still referred to by some of his acquaintances — drinks in gushes, is drained over and over again.

COLOMBIA — In an improvised hut of soil floor and zinc roof, encrusted in the tragic blend of beauty and forgetfulness of the Colombian fields, the suffocation caused by 40 degrees of temperature concentrates at the same time that the anger of a peasant-looking, enigmatic, and unpredictable man boils. In keeping pace with unceasing puffs of smoke which rarefy the mosquito-infested environment, this young man speeds up the rhythm of his marked regional accent and suddenly, sends flashes of anger with his glance. But, seconds later, he admits having made mistakes and reveals the intensity of his conflicts.

BOGOTA — In an exclusive interview with Cambio16, the commander of the self-defense leagues says that “the final onslaught” is underway. He maintains that peace negotiations are imminent and that the guerrilla groups will have to request the presence of the self-defense leagues at the negotiating table. Castaño also states that, if this is not the case, paramilitary forces will attack guerrilla members after their “reinsertion” into society.

BOGOTA — A paramilitary incursion from July 14 to 20 this year by private armed groups that combat guerrilla forces has made this municipality in the Colombia Plains Region into a mere ghost town though it was once a center of subversive influence of the FARC ( "The Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces"), that country's oldest guerrilla group. Fear runs so rampant in this little village that even the special Prosecutors sent to investigate the massacre have felt its sting, as evidenced by their managing to take testimony in a record five (5) hours without once venturing forth from the Mayor's Offices. According to a military source, the Army received information on the presence of paramilitary groups in the region on July 14, the very same day that 120 or 150 armed men marched into the town of Mapiripan. The town's penal municipal judge, Leonardo Iván Cortés-Novoa, called the Army battalion commander in charge of the area eight (8) times to ask for assistance. Nevertheless, the army waited until July 21 to send in troops, after 25 of the townspeople had been torn limb from limb while still alive, according to Cortés and other residents who saw the victims forced into the town's slaughterhouse. Those present claim that members of the par amilitary groups savagely dismembered their friends with knives and machetes, throwing the severed arms and legs into the turbulent waters of the Guaviare River, which borders the town.